Patents on video game mechanics to strangle innovation, fun

As the gaming industry grows more competitive, patenting broad ideas and game …

While it seems every few months video games are released that feature some novel idea, the overwhelming majority of titles are building off of what has been released before. This isn't a shocking thing for any art form, and lazy critics know the first thing you do when discussing a game, movie, or television show is to look at what has influenced the work and see how the property in question has moved things forward. But video games are now facing a new challenge when trying to build on past concepts: gameplay ideas are being patented.

At first blush, patents on gameplay mechanics are a good idea; they allow the creators of these ideas to profit from them. The issue is that the patents are so becoming so broad, and so prohibitive to fight in court, that very basic ideas are being locked down by a few companies.

"For example, the Namco patent on load-time mini-games (US Patent Number 5,718,632), as originally used in the PlayStation 1 version of Ridge Racer, contains 16 claims, many of which are almost identical to one another," game designer and writer Ernest Adams recently wrote in an editorial about this issue in Gamasutra. This could effectively lock out other developers from putting games in their loading screens.

The ideas in the patent are mind-twistingly described: "A recording medium in accordance with this invention preferably has program code means relating to an auxiliary game and program code means relating to a main game," the description reads. "The size of the program code means relating to the auxiliary game is small in comparison with the size of the program code means relating to the main game, and the relationship between the program code means relating to the auxiliary game and the program code means relating to the main game is such that the program code means relating to the auxiliary game is always loaded first, before the program code means relating to the main game."

Do you know what the patent is describing? It uses an incredible number of words to say "a smaller program is loaded while the main game loads, so the player is kept entertained while waiting for the game to start." The patent conceivably keeps other companies from placing games on their loading screens, but the language is so broad that it could be possibly used to keep any kind of interaction from taking place during a load screen. If developers decide to put something amusing for the player to do into a loading screen, they could find themselves in the middle of costly litigation. Many companies would rather play it safe than fight the good fight in court.

Already a problem

We've already seen the danger of these patents. Sega owns patent no. 6,200,138, which is entitled "Game display method, moving direction indicating method, game apparatus and drive simulating apparatus." What this means is that Sega has a lock on the idea of driving a car around a city with an arrow pointing towards the next destination; it's a patent on Crazy Taxi, more or less.

Simpson's Road Rage was a game that featured Simpsons characters driving around a city, picking up customers, and dropping them off in other locations, all with an arrow pointing towards the next destination. When the game came out, Sega promptly sued Fox Entertainment, EA, and Radical Games. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Don't expect to see many arrows in your driving games, unless they've been cleared by a number of lawyers making sure they're not close to Sega's idea of what an arrow can or should point to.

"[The US patent office's] guidelines for patent examiners require that the invention produce a concrete, useful, and tangible result, and gameplay patents are being allowed," Adams wrote. "I assert that the very definition of a game precludes its gameplay from constituting a concrete, useful, and tangible result. A game takes place in a pretended reality—the magic circle. Its mechanics are not concrete, useful or tangible; they are make-believe... What if someone had patented the mouse and keyboard mechanism for controlling a first-person avatar? Or the 'lean' button that lets you lean out to peek around a corner?"

A case could be made that developers are simply playing by the rules put before them, that the patent system is broken and out of date for something like gameplay concepts in video games. That's a much bigger argument, however, and in the meantime, the thought of more such patents locking down broad gameplay ideas is frightening. If it becomes impossible to build on what has come before, we could see a few companies owning entire genres or gameplay concepts, which isn't a good thing for anyone. The gaming world would be a vastly different place, for instance, had id patented the idea of the first-person shooter.